Brano Sev in the mid-1950s

BRANO OLEKSY SEV was born January 12th, 1917 in Bobrka, an oil town in the valleys north of the Tatra Mountains. He was, as has been noted, "unexceptional in school...[quote]" His parents, Andrezej and Iwona Sev, worked as farmers, and for most of his life, Brano expected to follow in his father's footsteps.

However, when in 1939 the German Army invaded, Brano and a friend, Marek Piotrowski, escaped from Borka and joined the partisans hiding out in the mountains, led by Major Laszlo "Lion" Cerny. While Marek was killed early in the war, Brano distinguished himself as a fine sniper, and was taken under Colonel Cerny's wing.

Once the war ended, Brano went with his partisan comrades to the Capital, where they took part in the establishment of a socialist state under the charismatic rule of Secretary General Mihai ([year]-1956). Brano joined the Ministry for State Security as a captain in late 1945, working with Cerny in the Ministry offices at Yalta Boulevard, 36.

While successful in the Ministry offices, Brano was soon transferred to a desk in the First District Militia Station, where he would keep a desk, of and on, for nearly thirty years. His responsibilities included watching over the activities of the militiamen he worked with, assisting them with their cases, and working on independent cases for the Ministry.

During those early years, Brano achieved a level of fame unheard of for members of the security services, whose activities are by necessity kept secret. But this was a time when Mihai's regime was still establishing itself, and was open to regaling its citizens, through the pages of The Spark, with tales of impressive agents who brought to justice Nazi collaborators who hid in the countryside and in the dilapidated Canal District. Then the show trials were reported, also on the radio, before the criminals were sentenced to life in the work camps.

In 1957, Brano went on the first of a series of external trips. In Tel Aviv, he monitored the activities of Egyptian and Palestinian communist groups, and set up meetings between them and the Ministry. In 1960, he liaisoned with members of the Greek Cypriot communists based in Athens, and the following year he was in Belgrade briefly as a "cultural attache" in his embassy, while in fact running a series of agents throughout the Yugoslav capital.

For all of 1964, Brano was stationed West Berlin, this time as a finance attache, where he ran a large circuit of agents for the embassy's rezident. While his time there is only partly known, it has been revealed that he did kill one man, a Berliner known only as "Schweizer", in retaliation for the murder of one of Brano's agents.

For the next two years, Brano remained at his desk in the First District Militia Station, continuing to work through the minutae of tracking and prosecuting questionable loyalties in the citizens living in the Capital. It is interesting to note that from three decades of watching the militia officers working around him, there is only one instance of any being charged by him with a crime: Ferenc Kolyeszar, in 1956. And though he was sent briefly to a work camp, because of Brano's efforts his punishment was remanded to internal exile.

It was in 1966 that Brano was sent to Vienna as a cultural attache--this time, he was the actual rezident of Vienna, controlling all the city's agents. This stationing, however, was short-lived when an operation to uncover a mole in their service went awry. Upon returning home, Brano found himself charged with treason, in part due to his romantic association with Dijana Frankovic, Yugoslav national living in Vienna, who was suspected as being a spy.

Only through the hard work of his friend, Colonel Laszlo Cerny, did Brano avoid time in a work camp, and execution. He was drummed out of the Ministry for State Security and sent to work at the Pidkora automotive factory on the outskirts of the Capital.

36 Yalta Boulevard (The Vienna Assignment in the UK) examines the circumstances and events that followed Brano's disastrous 1966 Vienna stationing. Because while Brano, standing on the assembly line of the Pidkora factory, thought that his troubles had ended, the fact was that they had only just begun.